Palm has announced that they will be releasing a Plug-in Development Kit for webOS developers, allowing them to take advantage of new capabilities on webOS devices. What does this mean for application developers? Lots:

Easy to port existing C/C++ applications to webOS, including those that use OpenGL ES 1.1 or 2.0

Easy integration of C/C++ components to enhance the capability of webOS applications built with Mojo

This means hardware accelerated games and other applications that require more computing horsepower than Mojo can provide. Check out the technologies behind the PDK after the break.

The GNU Compiler Collection includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...).

Sounds great, and it should all be arriving in March this year. If you're feeling antsy and want to get a head start, check out the WIDK (WebOS Internals Development Kit) at webos-internals.org. (You'll need to already be familiar with a *nix type environment to get up and running quickly.)

An interesting piece that appears further down in the announcement:

"The PDK offers access to some capabilities — like accelerated OpenGL-powered 3D graphics — that are not currently exposed to applications built entirely with web technologies.

However, we are hard at work delivering similar capabilities to all webOS applications. While we are not yet ready to announce our specific SDK plans in this area, we are closely tracking the rapid evolution of browser capabilities based on emerging standards, such as WebGL, CSS Transforms, and O3D for 3D graphics, and we are enormously excited about their potential to revolutionize the web.

You can expect us to aggressively implement the best of these and other similar forward-looking web standards, proposed web standards, and other extensions designed to expose native device capabilities to webOS applications."

Exciting times for webOS. Let's hope Palm can hold on long enough to get these tools into our hands so we can start cranking out some awesome applications.